BETTER IDEA? - This property in Hyannis Port has opted for a variety of shrubs and grasses rather than a plain old boring lawn.

Eight or 10 years ago while we were mowing the lawn, neighbors driving by our dead-end street in Hyannis would sometimes stop to say we had the nicest patch of grass in the neighborhood.

Well, why not? The fellows from a now defunct lawn company used to come by a few times a year in their miniature oil tanker trucks loaded with "chems" and douse the lawn with them. We never really knew what that stuff was, only that it seemed to groom the green rather nicely.

We are learning that ignorance of lawn care chemicals is a general public condition in view of the reports in the Cape Cod Times chronicling NStar's running battle with the Green Machine on use of herbicides on its right of ways.

A Cape Cod Commission study draft also shows we were not alone in allowing the use of bad stuff on our lawn so it would be pretty on top like Secretary of State Kerry's white hair...while threatening water supplies below like mythological "Acheron," the river of woe.

After a few years of dealing with the company, we suspected there was consistent turnover in the company's labor department because we got a new fellow about every other year or so, some, we suspected, with less training that their predecessors.

One of them sprayed something on the lawn the last year we did business with them, essentially paying for the near-fatal damage to our own lawn. The chemical overdose propelled us into the ranks of the teenie greenies, that is, the anonymous homeowners who for whatever reason, learned to "just say no" to drenching lawns with skull-and-bone chemicals.

In effect, we trustingly made a pact with Mother Nature: We would eschew all sorts of chemicals on the property in the belief that she, like momma, knew best.

With halos floating above our heads, we went a step further by ignoring, rather than poisoning, the swarm of flying ants (a/k/a termites) hovering like helicopters above an in-ground nest about 10 feet from the house. Mother Nature will take care of them, we believed as surely as we believe there might, or might not, be a heaven and hell or that Congress might, or might not, know what it is doing.

Here we are eight or so years later and the lawn is an eclectic melange of jaundiced thatches complemented by brown-black spots where the lady of the house has weeded on bended knee. Fortunately, there are a few patches of wispy green here and there that give us hope of a rebirth.

So nobody mentions how nice the lawn is anymore…

And those flying ants of long ago? Well, they must have eventually decided to find a good out-of-the-way café at our house, and succeeded. They munched ravenously on unseen shingles hidden between the back-deck header board nailed to the house by an S.O.B. fly-by-night deck crew that fudged on flashing that should have gone under the shingles. So the termites also had a moderate portion of plywood for dessert that now should be replaced at considerable cost to a household of modest means.

The dilemma now is whether to poison the life out of termites, ants and other assorted creatures that, from our rationalized point of view, don't pay rent or taxes, trespass on private property and do some damage with impunity. Likewise, should we impose a sentence of death by poison on broadleaf weeds, dandelions and various mosses at the risk of ultimately doing ourselves in, too?

This having been said, one can empathize on a larger scale with NStar's predicament as it finds itself on a slippery slope and also with homeowners yearning for a product that will provide beautiful lawns without potentially killing off or negatively mutating mankind through toxic water.

We have recently put care-free fiber-cement siding on the house along with vinyl windows and trim and are now looking for a plastic lawn that looks like real grass, doesn't grow or stain or rot or harbor an assortment of bugs.

In the meantime, we'll look into lawn alternatives to gussy up the homestead without (too much) poison. We want to keep mankind safe, the town's recently empowered property police at arm's length and neighbors telling us how nice our lawn is.